Walmart Will Let You Shop Until 10 PM

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Aug 15, 8:42AM EDT

Walmart Will Let You Shop Until 10 PM — © fotomak / Shutterstock.com

Retail sales rose 1.2% in July and reached pre-pandemic levels. Within hours, Walmart Inc. (NYSE: WMT | WMT Price Prediction) said it would keep 4,000 of its 4,700 stores open until 10 p.m. The closing time at most stores had been 8:30. The retails sales and Walmart announcement were a coincidence. However, Walmart would not have made the decision without more demand. As the largest retailer in America, by far, the plan has to be very good news.

As a side note, Walmart made a change to when seniors can shop. They will get an hour, on their own, every Tuesday. Walmart also extended the time its pharmacies will be open.

Two things happened when the pandemic hit hard. Retailers shuttered stores and Amazon.com took even more of their business, which continued a two-decade trend. There was a concern among traditional retailers that the consumer “all Amazon all the time” trend would be permanent. The Walmart decision should put some of that to rest.

Walmart remains the miracle of big-box retail. It has a large online presence, which is by many measures just behind Amazon’s. It swung to curbside delivery. Anecdotally, 90% of Americans live within 20 miles of a Walmart. It also has a broader line of merchandise, and it has grocery sales that match Kroger’s.
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The Walmart decision is important for a strategic reason. Target already has stores that are open until 10 p.m. That left open the possibility Walmart could lose business late in the day.

Walmart, which like most companies has pulled its financial guidance due to the spread of COVID-19, could see an impressive rebound in is third-quarter earnings. The extension of open hours points to that conclusion. That leaves the only substantial risk to the rebound another wave of the coronavirus, which is still in the first wave in large states like Florida, Texas and California.

Walmart will be open until 10 p.m. now in most locations. That is welcome news for retailers and the broader economy.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.